Janet Malcolm

Examining the lawsuit between Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, and Joe McGinniss the author of a book about the crime.

The Journalist and the Murderer

Examines the afterlife of the troubled poet, looking at how her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, struggled to share Plath's work, yet maintain his own privacy. Reprint.

Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes

The Silent Woman

Malcolm's celebrated account of the falling-out of two unlikely friends is a fascinating portrait of a bizarre, cloistered world and the obsessed men who inhabit it.

In the Freud Archives

This collection of essays from the prize-winning author and writer for The New Yorker attempts to offer insight into the working minds of writers and artists including Edith Wharton, Edward Weston, Thomas Struth and Sylvia Plath.

Essays on Artists and Writers

Forty-one False Starts

“One of the premier narrative non-fiction writers of her time.” —The New Republic Janet Malcolm’s previous collection, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, was “unmistakably the work of a master” (The New York Times Book Review). Like Forty-One False Starts, Nobody’s Looking at You brings together previously uncompiled pieces, mainly from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. The title piece of this wonderfully eclectic collection is a profile of the fashion designer Eileen Fisher, whose mother often said to her, “Nobody’s looking at you.” But in every piece in this volume, Malcolm looks closely and with impunity at a broad range of subjects, from Donald Trump’s TV nemesis Rachel Maddow, to the stiletto-heel-wearing pianist Yuju Wang, to “the big-league game” of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In an essay called “Socks,” the Pevears are seen as the “sort of asteroid [that] has hit the safe world of Russian Literature in English translation,” and in “Dreams and Anna Karenina,” the focus is Tolstoy, “one of literature’s greatest masters of manipulative techniques.” Nobody’s Looking at You concludes with “Pandora’s Click,” a brief, cautionary piece about e-mail etiquette that was written in the early two thousands, and that reverberates—albeit painfully—to this day.

Essays

Nobody's Looking at You

Through an intensive study of "Aaron Green, " a Freudian analyst in New York City, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm reveals the inner workings of psychoanalysis.

The Impossible Profession

Psychoanalysis

"She couldn't have done it, and she must have done it." This is the enigma at the heart of Malcolm's riveting new book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention.

Anatomy of a Murder Trial

Iphigenia in Forest Hills

Presents an investigation of the lives and works of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Gertrude and Alice

Two Lives

Ian Frazier

A Memoir

Pictures

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life, examining twelve family photographs to construct a memoir from camera-caught moments, each of which pose questions of their own. She begins with the picture of a morose young girl on a train, leaving Prague at the age of five in 1939. From there we follow her to the Czech enclave of Yorkville in Manhattan, where her father, a psychiatrist and neurologist, and her mother, an attorney from a bourgeois family, traded their bohemian, Dada-inflected lives for the ambitions of middle-class America. From her early, fitful loves to evenings at the old Metropolitan Opera House to her fascination with what it might mean to be a "bad girl," Malcolm assembles a composite portrait of a New York childhood, one that never escaped the tug of Europe and the mysteries of fate and family. Later, Malcolm delves into her marriage to Gardner Botsford, the world of William Shawn's New Yorker, and the libel trial that led her to become a character in her own drama. Displaying the sharp wit and astute commentary that are Malcolmian trademarks, this brief volume develops into a memoir like no other.

On Photography and Memory

Still Pictures

A biographical study of the Russian literary master and his works is set against the backdrop of a modern-day journey to Russia and the various places where Anton Chekhov lived and worked, reflecting on the characters and ideas her created in his remarkable short stories and plays. 25,000 first printing.

A Critical Journey

Reading Chekhov

La Mujer del Silencio

SYLVIA PLATH AND TED HUGHES

THE SILENT WOMAN

Neste ensaio biográfico, a autora examina todas as biografias já escritas sobre Plath para demonstrar como é tênue o limite entre fato e ficção. Uma das poetas mais originais do século XX, Sylvia Plath se suicidou no inverno de 1963, poucos meses depois de se separar do marido, o também poeta Ted Hughes. Esse gesto último selou, em torno de sua vida e sua obra, um campo de forças tão poderoso que ainda hoje continua a opor não só os vivos aos mortos, como todos os que sobreviveram à tragédia. Neste livro, Janet Malcolm se debruça sobre todas as biografias já escritas sobre Sylvia Plath, além de adentrar um intrincado mundo de cartas, arquivos e delicadas situações familiares. Dotada de elegância e senso narrativo excepcionais, Malcolm mescla psicanálise, poesia, biografia e reportagem, num ensaio de amplitude e profundidade surpreendentes, capaz de envolver o leitor com o magnetismo de uma trama policial.

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes e os limites da biografia

A mulher calada

Focusing on the nature of biography, Malcolm examines the biographies of Sylvia Plath, with particular focus on Anne Stevenson's controversial 'Bitter Fruit', to discover how Plath became the enigma of literary history, and how the legend continues to exert such a hold on our imaginations.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

El Periodista y El Asesino

Duas vidas

Malcolm brings together for the first time essays published over the course of several decades (many from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect Malcolm's preoccupation with artists and their work.

Forty-One False Starts

To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.

Janet Malcolm

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